


Bitter Pill

by kartography, the_spin (kartography)



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-23
Updated: 2009-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-05 02:12:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kartography/pseuds/kartography, https://archiveofourown.org/users/kartography/pseuds/the_spin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post Journey's End. Things don't exactly go as planned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bitter Pill

**Author's Note:**

> This is pure macro-inspired insanity that I wrote today in a fit of boredom at work. Sorry for the crackficlet, world.

_   
**Bitter Pill (PG: Ten, Ten II, Rose)**   
_

 

 

 

-

"I've been waiting for you," he says.

-

Something's gone wrong in the Universe; the Doctor can feel it deep in the marrow of his bones. It started off small: a ruined colony when he stopped off on Tudonia for a cup of their excellent hot cocoa, a reactor core meltdown on New Tokyo in the 82nd century, an outbreak of the long-extinct Grosgian plague in the Haxxteran sector.

But it snowballs from there and it tugs at the back of his mind, something beyond the universe's usual tendency towards entropy, something driving it faster and faster and inexorably into chaos.

Twenty-five stars supernova on a Tuesday, completely wiping out the Thal and the Judoon homeworlds, and the Doctor decides that whatever it is, this something needs fixing.

 

-

 

He tracks the source of the electromagnetic wave that overloaded the cores of the now-defunct stars, steps out of the TARDIS into a deserted military base in the frozen mountains of Kao Ishan. He tugs his coat tighter around himself, strides off into the darkened passageways. It's here, the something. It throbs through his veins, pulses in his temples and he knows: somewhere in this concrete bunker, something is horribly, terribly wrong.

 

-

 

There's a machine, twisting and golden and hideous. He looks at it and his retinas burn; his time sense screams. It shouldn't exist but here it is, sitting quietly in front of a wall made all of glass, gleaming lines sharpened by the contrast against the snowy white of the mountains outside.

Someone coughs into a fist and he manages to squeeze his eyes shut, to rip his gaze away from that metal monstrosity. He's not alone in the room; there's another man pressed against the window, looking out into the buffeting winds.

He turns, a tall streak of black, and the Doctor swallows very, very hard, because he knows that face well. He should; he shaves it every morning. The other man smiles, but there's no mirth in it, no joy, nothing but cold and ice and revenge.

"I've been waiting for you," he says.

 

-

 

It's easy enough to work out which of his many selves he's looking at; there's a heavy silver ring on the fourth finger of the man's left hand.

"What have you done?" the Doctor demands. "Where's Rose?"

Flat laughter squeezes out of him and the Doctor shivers; the sound is broken and jagged. Nothing like human. "Rose," he echoes smoothly, mocking. "Rose, you absolute prick, is _dead_."

He blinks and his hearts are squeezing like nothing he's ever felt before. "You killed her. I left you to keep her safe and you murdered her."

Before he can react, the other man's across the room, fingers wrapped around his throat and clenching tight. "I loved her," he hisses and it's no longer ice and slickness; his eyes burn instead with a mad sort of fire. "Don't you dare. I loved her more than anything and that's more than I can say for you."

"I'm not sure what you're hoping to accomplish with the choking," and he tries for mild. Mild is best, he thinks, for dealing with madmen. "Respiratory bypass and all."

The other man swallows, steps backward. The Doctor looks at him, really looks. The suit is black. Black shirt, black tie, black carnation in the buttonhole. The sort of thing he might wear to a funeral. The sort of thing he might wear to mourn a beloved wife.

"What happened?" he asks quietly.

The man achieves control, features rearranging back into the mask of smooth, detached self-assuredness. "Car accident."

"I'm sorry."

"Oh," the man in black says, rolls his eyes. "Fuck you."

"I sympathize, of course, but you do understand that's really no excuse for wiping out eighteen inhabited solar systems."

He smiles at that, a cold flat turn of his mouth, and he strokes long fingers across a golden lever. "I had to get your attention somehow, didn't I? Looks like it worked. Well done, me." He turns to grin, to bare his teeth and stare into him with too-dark eyes. "Besides, it was fun."

Something niggles at his memory, something so far away and _no, it's not possible_ but oh, it is; he knows that dark potential's always been there lurking in himself, buried deep below the surface. The Doctor clenches his teeth. "What are you?"

Hands slip into suit pockets. "The stuff," he says with a harsh kind of cheerfulness, "of your nightmares."

 

-

 

The Valeyard. The bloody Valeyard, destroying the Universe with his own face.

"I thought we'd finished with this Rubbish-Yard stuff ages ago," he says, tamping down the edge of panic because suddenly the machine makes sense. He couldn't understand it at first because there's no one left in creation who could build something like that, excepting him, and he never would. Never would, except as this twisted, hateful thing. "Valeyard, ha! Plonker's yard, more like."

"Well," the Valeyard says in his own familiar voice, buffing his nails carelessly against the lapel of his funeral suit. "Should've thought of that before you dumped me off to rot in a backwater universe with nothing more than a tiny human girl for a jailer." He sighs. "Left her to fix me. Oh, you sanctimonious ass."

"Why are you here?"

"What, a love of destruction isn't enough for you?"

"You forget that I know you. You'd be perfectly happy undermining the other universe, turning it to your own purposes. No reason for you to come back here, and you've always been the practical sort." He looks at the machine, runs his palm over the shining console. "This had to take some doing, building something to tear down the walls of reality all by yourself. You must've ripped the other world apart at the seams."

"Oh, yes. All of those planets dead and gone and dust." The man's mouth screws up thoughtfully. "And perhaps," he says, "I just wanted to punch you myself?" The Doctor snorts. "Fine. I've come for the TARDIS. I need it for something."

"You're madder than I thought, if you think I'm just going to hand you that kind of power right after you've completely wiped out four species."

'We had three years," the Valeyard says abruptly, his lips thinning, and it takes the Doctor a moment to follow his meaning. "Three perfect years, and then one day I knew she needed me, I could hear her in my head, and I ran. I ran, and she was only three blocks away from our flat, but by the time I got there she was dead."

His gut twists with empathy against his will. "You can't go back and change it. That's not how we work. You've just got to live it."

"I tried!" Fists clench convulsively. "I tried. But do you have any idea what it's like to be stuck in one place, stuck in one time as your body withers away around you? It's hideous. I could've done it for her, but not alone. So I tried everything. I even tried to die, but it wouldn't take."

The Doctor blinks. "Really? Curious."

"Truly. Tried to die, and there I stayed." He sighs, runs a hand through his hair, and this man isn't the Valeyard of his memory. Some pale shadow of him, really, and the Doctor smiles a little at the thought. Maybe his time with Rose did more to iron out the darker wrinkles of himself then he guessed.

"Torchwood had this machine, you know. A sort-of dimension cannon. She helped design it, the brilliant girl. I tried to modify it, just so I could hop a bit of time. Just to jump back and save her. But it went all sideways."

The Doctor watches him carefully, tracks the flat, dead eyes. "Obviously."

"I tasted the Vortex," the man says with his own mouth, and the words echo along the vaulted concrete ceilings. "I tasted time and space, but it still didn't work."

"And here you stand," the Doctor murmurs, "reborn. The vengeful god, ruling over all he can see."

He smiles. "Now you've got it. The TARDIS, if you please." The Doctor looks down at the sudden pressure against his ribs; the Valeyard's got an illegal laser blaster pressed up into his kidney. "If I'm going to conquer the universe, I'm going to need someone fun to share it with and I've got just the girl in mind."

"You'll cause a paradox. You'll rip that planet apart if you just pull her out of her timeline."

The Valeyard grins that empty, leering grin, leans very close; his breath burns against the shell of the Doctor's ear as one of the machine's massive cables digs into his lower back. "Already done it once. Who do you honestly think's going to care if the world ends two years ahead of schedule?"

 

-

 

It's laughably easy, getting away. He thinks he should be pleased that he's so rubbish at being evil, but he can't muster the enthusiasm. But really, all it takes is an outstretched foot, a stumble, and the Tazer he started keeping in his pocket for emergency situations after that last run-in with the Master.

"Oof," the Valeyard mutters as fifty-thousand volts of electricity crackle through his body. "Not fair."

He locks the unconscious man in the TARDIS larder. "Watch him," he tells the ship. "I mean it. And don't let him sweet-talk you. He's an evil prick, sob story or no."

He spends a long time in the console room, thinking. Makes himself tea, and thinks some more.

When he returns to the larder, his twin is slumped in a corner against the baked beans and the boxes of chocolate biscuits, looking decidedly dejected and not in the least bit threatening. The Doctor sighs, and the other man looks up. His eyes are suspiciously wet.

"Come to gloat?"

The Doctor leans against the door, shoves hands in his pockets. "As entertaining as that sounds, no. I'm going to help you. Not, you understand, because I like you or because I think you deserve any modicum of happiness, but because it's the easiest way to set the Universe to rights again. I've got to undo all the damage you've done somehow."

The Valeyard grins up at him from the dusty floor. "Oh, I knew you'd come around. You go on and on about the sanctity of the timelines and all that bollocks, but as soon as a little blonde human's in the mix it flies all out the window."

He says nothing, doesn't want to acknowledge the truth of it, so he turns on his heel and slams the door shut behind him.

"Thank you!" he hears the man call out from behind the wall. The TARDIS hums her approval.

"Oh, stop it," he mutters. "Honestly."

 

-

 

The doors open onto a busy street in a pretty little neighborhood, full of perfect tiny houses with perfect postage-stamp lawns all crammed up one against the other. He looks upward; a traffic signal sways lazily in the wind. On the blink, he thinks. The red's light's out on one side. A tall hedge stands on the corner closest to him; anyone driving by wouldn't be able to see an oncoming car from the intersecting street.

He hears the grind of an engine, turns. A delivery truck is rumbling its way up the narrow street. He looks right and there's the small black coupe he's waiting for, winding its way through traffic towards the intersection, and he can see it. He sees what's about to happen.

Or, he sees what would have happened.

Adrenaline sings through his veins and he grabs the closest thing at hand, a wheeled black rubbish bin, and shoves as hard as he can. The bin rolls into the middle of the street and the truck swerves as it barrels through what would've been a red light. Indeed, it swerves, and just barely misses broadsiding Rose Tyler's tiny black car.

She spins out in a scream of scorched rubber, collides with a metal signpost and screeches to a halt. He runs, practically rips the door off in his haste to get to her and suddenly he's got an armful of warm, dazed human.

"Wha-," she murmurs against him, fingers clutching his lapels. His legs tremble with the confusing swell of emotions, go out from under him and he cradles her blonde head against his chest. There's a scarlet dribble of blood winding down from her temple; he carefully wipes it away with his cuff.

"You okay?" he asks her very softly, and his voice shakes a little because she smells exactly like he remembers. He's not sure how many more goodbyes he can take. She blinks up at him, and her pupils are far too wide. She must've hit her head, he thinks with a pang.

A small crowd gathers around them; "Is she hurt?" a young woman in a red sweater asks.

"Someone call an ambulance," he snaps.

"Doctor?" she queries softly, and when he looks down at her she's staring at the brown pinstripes of his suit, all soft concussed confusion.

"Just a dream," he whispers, tugs her close to him for one last hug. He presses a gentle kiss to her forehead, feels his hearts break all over again as he runs his thumb over the silver wedding band on her finger. "And try to be more careful, will you? Stay safe, Rose Tyler, for my sake and for the sake of the whole bloody Universe."

She's slipping into unconsciousness and he lets gravity have its way, lets her body slide slowly out of his arms and onto the asphalt. She'll be safe, taken care of, and that's all he needs.

He's halfway back to the TARDIS when he hears the desperate pounding of feet against pavement, just before the connection flares in his mind, and he turns to see a familiar figure in a blue suit and trainers sprinting up over the crest of the hill, face sick and terrified.

He's nearly to Rose when he glances up, skids to a stop as he sights the TARDIS. His eyes fall on the Doctor, dart to Rose, to the truck and the overturned rubbish bin. The Doctor can't help but smile at the slow, grateful grin spreading its way over the other Doctor's features.

He raises an arm over his head in farewell. The other man laughs, raises his own in return before striding over to the small crowd hovering around his wife.

The Doctor nods to himself, leaves them to each other. Tries not to look back over his shoulder as he closes the door of the TARDIS behind him, does his best not to watch his other self gathering Rose carefully into his arms as if she's the most precious thing in his world. It's not worth it, the wondering.

 

-

 

He spins dials, presses buttons, and the TARDIS starts the long, slow grind back through the Void. The air shivers and he's knows it's the futures of two universes rewriting themselves around him, bending to his whim. At least the futures are brighter, this way.

He walks slowly down the hallway; his fingers stall at the door. He turns the lock half-afraid of what he'll find.

The larder is blissfully empty, and he breathes a sigh of relief.

 

 

-end


End file.
